Review: "Dumbo"

Where’s the magic?

There’s nary a sprinkle of faerie dust in “Dumbo,” the new take on a Disney icon from director Tim Burton that never takes flight. Instead of a gentle fable about circus animals helping each other, it’s a standard-issue action spectacle complete with adorable kids, a missing parent and a cackling villain.

The new “Dumbo” is so human-heavy, the CGI elephant is relegated to being a sideshow.

Look, I’ve been agnostic about Disney’s let’s-take-our-animated-classics-and-turn-them-into-live-action-flicks obsession. I thought “Cinderella” perfectly wonderful. “Maleficent” was uneven but inspired. And this trend isn’t going away. Heck, we’ve got “Aladdin” and “The Lion King” on the docket just in the next few months.

But this adaptation is a total flop. It’s flat, colorless and almost hypnotically unemotional. The screenplay by Ehren Kruger feels like it was written by someone who only saw the 1941 original underwater with the sound turned off.

Danny DeVito gets in a few early kicks as Max Medici, the chatterbox owner of the Medici Bros. Circus where Dumbo is born. (Like most things with Max, the “brother” is flimflam; he’s the sole Medici.) After he agrees to sell out to upscale conman V. A. Vandevere, owner of the extravagant Dream Land amusement park, Max just stands around with hardly anything to say.

Vandevere (Michael Keaton) manages to be both humorless and un-scary. He wears a swoopy silver toupee and has an announcer preceding him everywhere he goes so folks know he’s important. He keeps a French former aerialist, Collette aka “Queen of the Heavens” (Eva Green), on his arm just because he wants people to think he’s sleeping with a knockout rather than actually sleeping with her.

Colin Farrell, an Irishman doing a woeful Okie accent, plays Holt Farrier, former center ring king as the head cowboy act of the Stallion Stars, recently returned from the war. Alas, he lost an arm to battle overseas and his wife to influenza while he was away. His two moppets, Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins), act as de facto friends and guardians of Dumbo.

The story, set in 1919, starts in Sarasota, Fla., and turns through small towns to Joplin, Mo., where Dumbo is born to a mother elephant named Jumbo that Max has just bought at discount. When baby Jumbo pops out with those big floppy ears, Max immediately wires to demand a refund for damaged goods.

The kids notice that the baby seems to hover for a second or two whenever he sneezes after inhaling a feather, though of course none of the grown-ups believe them. Eventually, though, he puts on the act in front of a crowd and soon dollar signs are springing in front of everyone’s eyes. Vandavere shows up almost immediately and offers Max a partnership -- the kind where he calls all the shots.

I’m truly not sure why this movie exists. There’s no overtaxed stork delivering Dumbo; Timothy Q. Mouse is glimpsed briefly but doesn’t speak and plays no role; the pink elephants on parade are mere soap bubbles; and forget about a murder of crows teaching Dumbo to fly. It’s pure elephant ear power.

Speaking of those ears: the CGI is good enough that it seems plausible Dumbo could get airborne by flapping them hard enough. But he’s just a little baby; what happens when he grows up and weighs five tons? Even hummingbird speed wouldn’t be enough to get higher than a peanut’s breadth off the ground.

Same goes for the movie, earthbound and ugh-y.

Video review: "300: Rise of an Empire"

Like its 2007 predecessor, “300: Rise of an Empire” is lusty parade of six-pack abs and copious bloodlettings, set against a historical backdrop that’s been washed through the spin cycle of modern fantasy tropes.

It has all the violence of the last movie, though no equally compelling figure like Gerard Butler’s commanding Leonidas, and certainly none of the verve and wit. If the last movie was dumb-but-glorious, the sequel is the same, minus the glory.

Set soon after the Battle of Thermopylae, “Rise of an Empire” depicts the sea battle between the forces of Persian god/king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) and the Greek armies, led by Athenian general Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton). Artemisia (Eva Green) is his primary nemesis, a ferocious military leader with a mysterious and tragic background.

The blood and guts fly prodigiously, and new director Noam Murro copies predecessor Zack Snyder’s penchant for speeding up and slowing down the action so we can gaze at the beautiful ribbons of crimson arcing across the screen. This movie has few of the mythological beasties of the last one, so it’s essentially man-on-man carving of flesh.

There are a lot of silly moments here, but probably the goofiest is when Themistocles and Artemisia hold a parley prior to the battle, which soon devolves into much grabbling of flesh. It’s supposed to be sexy; instead it’s laugh-out-loud awful.

Even if you’re a teenager or still one in heart, “300: Rise of an Empire” quickly grows tiresome, then pathetic.

The video comes with a decent-enough array of extra features, including a making-of documentary titled “The 300 Effect.” There are also featurettes on “Real Leaders & Legends,” “Women Warriors,” “Savage Warships” and “Becoming a Warrior.”

Extras are the same for Blu-ray and DVD versions.

Movie:

Extras:

Review: "300: Rise of an Empire"

Audiences were torn asunder over "300," the 2007 over-the-top bloodletting set against the (largely fictionalized) backdrop of the Battle of Thermopylae -- including me. The sober critic found it a transcendently silly movie, but my inner 15-year-old thought it cool beyond reasoning.

The entirely unnecessary sequel picks things up where they left off ... well, to be more accurate, it picks up 10 year prior to Spartan King Leonidas' brave, doomed stand with 300 men against the entire Persian army, then it flips to slightly before, and then slightly after, that battle. Part of the new film's fatal downfall is we're never quite sure how what we're seeing relates to the greater conflict.

Set largely at sea, "300: Rise of an Empire" features much of the stylized action of its predecessor, with men cutting each other apart in slow-mo, beautiful ribbons of crimson blood arcing toward the camera.
(For extra exposure to the spurting and squirting, see it in 3-D. Or don't.)

But it lacks any of the visceral punch of the original, and certainly has no figure to match with Gerard Butler's commanding Leonidas. The dastardly 8-foot-tall god/king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is back, briefly, but following a pithy origin story he exists mostly in the backdrop while his pet general, Artemisia (Eva Green), takes the fight to the Greeks with her armada of 1,000 ships.

Sullivan Stapleton is our stalwart stand-in as Themistocles, an Athenian general who (according to the prologue) slew Xerxes' father in an old battle, and now must unite the fractious city-states of Greece into a free nation and face down the invading horde.

Of course, it soon becomes personal between the opposing leaders, with the slithery Artemisia supplied a frightening backstory about an epic wrong committed against her by Greek soldiers. Themistocles is more mysterious, a charismatic but solitary leader -- and apparently a chaste one, too, preparing monk-like his entire life for this great battle.

In keeping with the franchise's signature mix of goofiness and self-seriousness, the pair enjoy a bedding before their inevitable showdown that's somehow even more violent than when they're playing with swords.

Previous director Zack Snyder, who seemed harmonically in tune with Frank Miller's lusty graphic novel, returns here as producer and co-screenwriter (with Kurt Johnstad). New director Noam Murro, whose only other feature film credit is the comedy "Smart People," lacks Snyder's primeval feel for the material, so that even the many beheadings and eviscerations are curiously flat and emotionless. It's like watching a butcher cleave lifeless flesh.

The first "300" also had a more fantastical element, with a pantheon of supernatural creatures filling out Xerxes' horde. Here, it's pretty much workaday guys trading spears and arrows from the decks of their ships, then switching to swords after they ram and grapple. Though once again, somehow every single Greek soldier boasts washboard abs. (The ancients were into cutting carbs and stomach crunches, don'cha know.)

"300: Rise of an Empire" kept the silliness of the original film but lost all its glorious verve. The combatants carve each other up prodigiously, but the mayhem carries no sting. It's got all the blood, but none of the guts.

Video review: "Dark Shadows"

The long, painful decline of Tim Burton from one of America's freshest filmmaking voices to hack-for-hire director has been going on for over a decade now. Other than the occasional, fleeting return to a semblance of his former form -- "Big Fish," "Corpse Bride" -- he's mostly spent his time remaking musty intellectual properties like "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "Alice in Wonderland."

Sad to say, but audiences have happily followed him down the rabbit hole of mediocrity. His recent films have made exponentially more money than his previous, more personal work.

That is, until "Dark Shadows." With this remake of the cult favorite TV show from the 1960s, audiences couldn't wrap their heads around Johnny Depp as a fish-pale vampire awoken during the 1970s and forced to co-exist with his less-than-groovy descendants (Michelle Pfeiffer and Chloë Grace Moretz among them).

Meanwhile, he must renew his battle with the witch (Eva Green) who imprisoned him long ago out of a twisted sense of love.

Gothic themes and macabre elements have always been part and parcel of the Burton package. But here it often seems like he and Depp are making a strange movie just for the sake of being strange.

The result is a curiously flat affair, not particularly scary and even less funny.

Here's hoping Burton's next movie -- yet another remake, but at least of his own short film "Frankenweenie" -- will fly higher. If not, it's time to put a stake through the heart of his career.

Video extras are a barely a step above so-so, and virtually non-existent of you don't spring for the Blu-ray edition. The DVD comes with only a single feature, a making-of featurette about the cast and their characters.

Go for the Blu-ray and you'll get eight more featurettes, focusing on such topics as the town of Collinsport, the extensive makeup process to turn the winsome Depp into a creepy bloodsucker, recapturing the fashion and music of the '70s and the film's special effects.

You also get six deleted scenes.

Movie: 2 stars out of four
Extras: 2.5 stars